It is possible—just—to look at Homer the other way around, and to hear the story of the Greeks arriving in the Mediterranean not as the Greeks told it in Homer but as the inhabitants of the literate, bureaucratic, authoritarian civilizations of the Mediterranean littoral told it themselves.
Nothing survives that describes Achilles or Odysseus directly, but there is a handful of Egyptian, Hittite and Hebrew texts that deal with people and habits occupying precisely the culture space of Homer’s Greeks: northern Indo-European warriors arriving in a world where they do not belong, where they seem like barbarians, people who don’t quite know how to behave. These unsympathetic versions of the Homeric story are strangely unsettling. Suddenly here is Achilles as his enemies might have seen him; Odysseus described by the smart, rich, complacent city-folk; Greek heroism as gang hooliganism; the Greek habit of woman-theft as nothing but rape; the beautiful volubility of the Homeric warrior looking pompous and absurd. Here, in this new light, are the Homeric tales with “Homer”—the dignity, understanding and tragic beauty of the poems—stripped out of them.
The Tale of Sinuhe is a short poetic biography of an Egyptian civil servant. It is a miraculous survival, the oldest version preserved on a reused roll of papyrus, buried in the tomb of a government official in the Egyptian city of Thebes on the west bank of the Nile in about 1800 BC. Probably looted from the tomb, it found its way to a London auction room in AD 1843, and versions of it are now preserved on fragments of papyrus in the British Museum and in Berlin. It had been popular in Egypt up to about 1000 BC, but until the Victorian Egyptologists deciphered it, no one had read Sinuhe’s story for three thousand years.
It is from almost exactly the moment the Greeks were arriving in the Mediterranean, piratical, violent men, hungry for the gold that soon enough would appear on the bodies and in the graves at Mycenae, but comes from a frame of mind perfectly opposed to theirs. This elegant, melancholic verse novel from the richest culture in the ancient world may be the contemporary of the first versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it loves nothing about them.
Sinuhe’s Egypt is a huge state structure. He is part of the great service industry attending to the god-pharaoh’s well-being, a court official—“a writing-man” is the Egyptian term—and a bureaucrat. It was the best possible job he could have. “Be a scribe,” a contemporary papyrus instructed its young readers. “Your limbs will be sleek, your hands will grow soft. You will go forth in white clothes, honoured, with courtiers saluting you.”
The Homeric assumption that suffering and conflict lie at the heart of existence, that life is essentially uncomfortable, is simply absent from Sinuhe’s world. His life is framed around repetitiveness, stability, normality, precision and security. Everything is measured and known. His tale begins on “the 7th Day of the 3rd Month of the Nile Flood Season, in the 20th year of the Pharaoh’s reign.” The rough estimates of Homeric time, the wide, veering guesses at the date of the Homeric stories, the generations that pass unrecorded—all that belongs to a different conceptual universe. For Sinuhe—whatever the historical truth—the pharaohs had ruled as far back in time as it was possible to imagine. Peace had prevailed, one pharaoh had succeeded another, cosmically great, unaddressably powerful, each handing the throne to his successor in a single direct linear sequence. The heart of happiness for these Egyptians was submission to that authority. The pharaoh “makes those born with him plentiful,” Sinuhe says. “He is unique, god-given. How joyful this land, since he has ruled. He extends his borders. He is the lord of kindness, great of sweetness. Through love he has conquered. His city loves him more than its own members.” Set that alongside the description of Agamemnon and his gift-giving in the Iliad, and you suddenly see him as a would-be pharaoh, a provincial satrap with ambitions beyond his reach, vulgarly attempting pharaonic status in the face of Achillean integrity.
The life of the Egyptian poor was miserable. They could expect to die when they were thirty-five, thousands lived in workhouses, obliged to sweat out their days in forced labor camps for the pharaonic regime and its monumental ambitions. But above them a bureaucratic middle class, Sinuhe’s class—perhaps 1 percent of the population was literate—managed the culture of continuity. In their linen-dressed elegance, the sense of overwhelming crisis and disruption that colors the deepest levels of the Homeric world was not even considered. Life was continuity. There was no need to be heroic, nor did the Greek hunger for honor play any part. For the ancient Egyptians, goodness consisted of service to pharaonic authority. As there was no distinction between that authority and the government of the universe, this life could be considered a kind of anteroom to heaven. The more silent and stable it could be made, the better.
Sinuhe loves the white linen he wears every day, and all the order in the Residence where he works. He is no self-sufficient hero. No existential crisis or anxiety about his individual identity or destiny ever pursues him. Sinuhe is a “Follower” and “True Acquaintance” of the pharaoh. His life is defined by the authority he serves. One of his tasks is to look after the pharaoh’s children, but at the moment his story begins, this steady, beautifully organized life is destroyed by a flash of panic. He hears something, a report of the old pharaoh’s murder in the palace. He thinks he should not have heard it, and worried in this totalitarian state that he might somehow be caught up in the repercussions, or even held responsible, he runs for his life, away from Egypt, north to the borders of Syria, and on across them, traveling at night, hiding at the edges of fields until at last he comes to a part of the world called Upper Retjenu.
It is the Egyptian name for Lebanon and maybe for the places beyond it. But Retjenu as a word is not a Semitic form; it does not belong in the Near East. It is Indo-European, probably from the language spoken by the Lycians, warrior inhabitants of southwest Anatolia, known to Homer as allies of the Trojans. Sinuhe, in other words, has found himself far out in the wilds surrounded by the warrior culture of the north. He has arrived in the land described by Homer. It is not the sort of world he is used to. It is a good country, he says, with figs and grapes, more wine than water, honey and oil, with all kinds of fruit on its trees. Barley is there, and emmer-wheat, and “numberless are its cattle of all kinds.” It is called Iaa, the “rushy place,” damp, fertile, rich in pastures, a million miles from the Egypt into which he was born.
The experience is horrifying at first. “This is the taste of death,” Sinuhe says, panicking at the disorder around him. All the calm of Egypt was gone. But then Sinuhe falls in with a chieftain, a warrior prince, a Diomedes or Sarpedon, and the chieftain does what heroes do in these circumstances: gives him plenty of cooked meat and wine, and delicious roast birds. They go hunting together, and from the great herds of cattle without which the Indo-European chieftains felt naked he gives Sinuhe “milk in every cooked dish.” The mark of Homeric civilization: beef in white sauce.
And so Sinuhe goes native. He abandons his white linen for armor. He turns warrior. His children become heroes, “each man subjugating his tribe.” Battle, which was absent from the life of an Egyptian bureaucrat, something that happened out here in the rawness of life on the frontiers, away from the deep calm of the central Egyptian state, now becomes the norm. He plunders cattle and carries off men and women as slaves. He kills again and again, as the Indo-European hero must do, and he attains “high regard” in the heart of his lord and chieftain, who loves him, knowing his valor.
Then the crisis: the naturally fissive atmosphere of the Indo-European warrior band breaks into the open, and a situation not unlike the opening scenes of the Iliad suddenly erupts. As Sinuhe latter recalls:
A hero of Retjenu came to provoke me in my tent;
he was an unmatched champion who had conquered all the land.
He said he would fight me, he planned to rob me, and had a mind to plunder my cattle, on the advice of his tribe.
Honor, rivalry, dignity, the brutally assertive self, the demands of violence, the contempt for communality—suddenly you are in the world of the Greeks outside Troy, but portrayed in an Egyptian tale. It doesn’t take much to imagine the shudder of anxiety in listeners at a party in Thebes one balmy evening in 1850 BC, just as the sun was setting over the western desert and the shadows were lengthening over the Nile. Did people out there really behave like this?
Sinuhe accepts the challenge, triumphs over the nameless hero, shooting him in the neck with an arrow and then killing him with his own ax, shouting his own vaunting war cry over the fallen hero’s back. But he is still an Egyptian, asking, in one of the most resonant questions for this moment in human history: “What can establish the papyrus on the mountain?” That is also the great Homeric question. What place can civilization have in a world dominated by the brute geological facts of violence and dominance? How fragile are the fibers of papyrus when set against the great rock-thrusts of the heroic world? Could these two ways of being ever be compatible?
Sinuhe is so successful as an Indo-European warrior that he ends up with more cows than he knows what to do with. Even so, an everlasting longing for Egypt lingers in his heart. “What matters more than my being buried in the land where I was born?” he asks. Somehow, the new pharaoh hears of Sinuhe’s longing, and soon enough an invitation arrives from him for Sinuhe to return to Egypt, where he will be honored and forgiven. Sinuhe gives his property in Retjenu to his eldest son and returns to Egypt, where he “touches the ground between the sphinxes” and comes face to face with the god-king he reveres.
“Act against yourself no more,” the pharaoh tells him, and as he hears the words, Sinuhe feels himself reabsorbed into the fabric of Egyptian society. The king says “he shall not fear,” and Sinuhe is re-created as a courtier. He abandons himself to the happiness of the king’s grace, prostrating himself before the pharaoh. Here in “the enduring security of the state” is the beauty of order to which he is at last allowed to return. He is rewarded with the things he has been dreaming of all the years he was away in the Homeric world.
I was appointed to the house of a prince
And costly things in it, with a bathroom in it,
And mirrors,
Clothes of royal linen
Myrrh and kingly fine oil
With officials whom the king loved in every room
And every serving man at his duty.
The years were made to pass from my limbs
I became clean shaven and my hair was combed
I was clad in fine linen
I was anointed with fine oil
I slept in a bed.
It is his majesty who has caused this to be done.
There is no other lowly man for whom the like was done.
I was in the favours of the king’s giving
Until the day of landing came.
The “day of landing” was the Egyptian phrase for the moment of death, the time when a human being at last achieves the goal of a perfect life, and Sinuhe’s return to Egypt is like a return to heaven. For all his adventuring, Egypt had originally made him what he was. Only there could he be himself again, and only by submitting to the Egyptian powers could his day of landing be good.
Our Odyssean frame of mind looks on that scene of Sinuhe’s reabsorption into his native world as a moment not of triumph but of diminution, a surrender of the vital if agonized self to the emasculated certainties of a beautifully bathed, shaved, linen-coated “Follower.” Was it really worth exchanging his florid Indo-European hair and beard, that fullness of self-assertion, for the bland comfort-soup of a happy “landing”? Or are we, as Homer’s heirs, merely addicted to crisis? Why not accept with Sinuhe, and the profoundly impressive longevity of Egyptian civilization, that the world of white linen and pharaonic tyranny is a better place than the discomforts of Retjenu and the threatening behavior of “heroes”? Are those heroes not in the end exactly as the Egyptians saw them, little better than human hyenas, repetitively needing to establish their sexual, genetic dominance of the pack? Surely human life has more to it than the Homeric tragedy of necessity? Or to put it in a more Sinuhesque way: is that necessity really necessary? Why not accept the virtues of modesty and the realities of power?
No Homeric character could ever have behaved like Sinuhe or have thought that his destiny was so bound up with the blessing the pharaoh and his court could bestow on him. Sinuhe ends up with a single answer: it is better to be at home, to submit, to recognize that power is god. Across the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey, there is nothing singular like this. The Homeric view of the world is essentially traumatic and multiple. All is in contention; power is something to be fought for, not accepted; the gods themselves are at each other’s throats; nature may stand there as a beautiful background, but it too is drenched in conflict and pain. The claims of individual triumph can never be reconciled with the claims of communal love and society. We live in the great and eternal war between those principles, Timē and Aretē, honor and virtue, self and other. Achilles sees that war as the source of human tragedy, Odysseus as the opportunity for self-advancement. And beyond them both stands Homer, the great voice of understanding, regarding us all, refusing to decide.
The Tale of Sinuhe is a mirror image of Homer, exploring the polarities of city and warrior-world from the opposite direction. But there are also parallels between them. Sinuhe could be seen as the Egyptian Odysseus, the hero thrust out into the wilds, gaining wisdom there, doing well even in his exile, finally returning, full of apprehension, to the place he longs to call home. And in one marvelous detail, they are clearly part of the same thought-world. Both, on reaching home, become themselves again by having a bath.
The bath for Homer is always a gesture of welcome, the physical metaphor for the domestic embrace. Perhaps the most famous bath in Greek antiquity is the one in which Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon on his return to Mycenae after the war. But that is not a Homeric story; it is the bleak invention of Aeschylus in the Oresteia. For Homer, whether it is the bathing of Odysseus after battle, or Telemachus on his visit to Nestor at Pylos, the bath is always beautiful and integrative, a moment of absorption.
Intriguingly, there is nothing uniquely Greek about this. The Homeric word for a bath, asaminthos, like hyacinth and labyrinth, comes from an unknown, non-Indo-European language spoken in the Mediterranean before the Greeks arrived there. It may have been the language of Minoan Crete. The unwashed Greeks coming down from the north borrowed the word as they borrowed the thing and the habit. The story of the hero returning home to the deliciousness of a bath is distributed all across the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. It is a shared symbol of homeliness and well-being. Gilgamesh, the ancient king of Uruk in south Iraq, who had also been journeying in the wilderness, in search of wisdom, cleansed its filth from his body as he came home to the city,
washing his long hair clean as snow in water … throwing off his furs and letting the sea carry them away, so that his fair body could be seen. Let the band around his head be replaced with a new one. Let him be clad with a garment, as clothing for his nakedness. When he gets to his city, when he finishes his journey, may his clothes show no sign of age, but still be quite new.
When Jacob returns in Genesis to Canaan, he tells his household first to “wash yourselves and change your clothes,” because in this shared Near Eastern culture, the thought-world to which the Homeric Greeks were so anxious to belong, no homecoming could be complete without the cleanness and sense of renewal that a bath can give you. Sinuhe, Gilgamesh, Jacob and Odysseus all soaked themselves in the same delicious soapiness.
You can still find beautiful baths in the palaces on Crete and at Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns on the mainland. Some are adorned with fish and the wavy lines of comforting water. Among the austere stoniness of those excavated sites, the baths become emblems of the longing to which the Homeric mind was prey. Nothing could be more inviting, more soaked in the desire for peace and civilization in a troubled world. The bath stands in opposition to Odysseus’s sufferings on the open sea. Here the water will merely lap at his limbs; the giant sea bream on the walls of the bath are his cohabitants in their shared springwater pool, the painted sea-waves no more than the memory of grief.
And so when Odysseus has at last made the frightening witch Circe submit to his will, he can allow her maidservants, the “daughters of the springs and the woods and the sacred rivers which run down to the sea,” to prepare him a bath. One of these girls, he recalls,
brought in the water and lit a blazing fire under the big cauldron so that the water grew hot. When the bright copper was boiling, she eased me into the bath and washed me with water from the great cauldron, hot and cold mixed as I desired, allowing it to run over my head and shoulders, washing the pain and weariness from my heart and limbs. When she had washed me and rubbed me with oil, she dressed me in a warm fleece and a shirt around my shoulders and led me to the hall, where she had me sit on a silver-studded chair with a stool to rest my feet.
But there is this difference: lying in their baths, Sinuhe, Gilgamesh and Jacob could all know they were returning to a home they could trust. Singularity and obviousness cluster around their bathrooms. But Homer is subtler than the Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Hebrew storytellers, because complexity and multiplicity, the fusion and stirring of meanings, is central to his purpose. Odysseus, when slipping into the delicious, erotic balm of Circe’s bath, is still years and miles from home, his “mind wandering, far away, lost in grim forebodings.” Circe is only the illusion of home and love, the wish-fulfillment version to which the traveler will always succumb. Her bath is a taunt and a punishment. Odysseus—and his listeners—must wait for the real thing.
* * *
A sidelight equivalent to Sinuhe’s is thrown on the Homeric Greeks in the astonishing archive of 30,000 cuneiform clay tablets recovered from the capital of the Hittites at Hattusa, near Bogaskale in central Anatolia. Contrasts and parallels abound here too. The Hittites were another Indo-European people who came south into Anatolia during the centuries after 2000 BC, infiltrating and then taking over the territory of the non-Indo-European Hatti, finally pushing on their southern frontier against the fringes of the great Mesopotamian powers and even the Egyptian empire.
Such close contacts with the ancient civilizations to the south meant that the Hittites adopted the literate, urbanizing habits of the Near East far earlier than the Greeks. By the time of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, the Hittites were already running an enormous, bureaucratically organized empire, with a network of military roads strung across it, stretching from Lebanon to the shores of the Aegean.
They kept their records in both Hittite and Akkadian, the Babylonian language that had become the lingua franca of diplomacy and government across the whole region from central Anatolia to the Tigris and the mouths of the Nile. The clay cuneiform tablets found at Hattusa are the file copies retained by the Hittite foreign office after the original treaties, usually on bronze or occasionally silver or iron tablets, had been sent to the other parties.
They give glimpses of an embracing power-world which carries echoes of life in the palaces at Troy, the fifty sons and sons-in-law gathered around Priam, the overwhelming nature of inheritance and the sense of greatness rippling down from its kingly source. The quasi-medieval atmosphere at these gatherings could not be farther from the high-risk anarchy barely an inch below the surface at any meeting of the Greek chieftains. One Hittite treaty, as its tablet records, was concluded in a great and ceremonial meeting
in the city of Urikina in the presence of Crown Prince Nerikkaili; Prince Tashmi-Sharumma; Prince Hannutti; Prince Huzziya; Ini-Teshshup, king of the land of Carchemish; Ari-Sharumma, king of the land of Isuwa; Amar-Mushen, uriyanni; Halpa-ziti, commander of the troops of the right; Prince Heshni; Prince Tattamaru; Prince Uppara-muwa, overseer of the golden grooms; Prince Uhha-ziti; Sahurunuwa, chief of the wooden-tablet scribes; Hattusa-Kurunta, general; Prince Tarhunta-piya; Lugal dLamaa, commander of the troops of the left; Ali-ziti, chief of the palace servants; Tuttu, chief of the storehouse; Palla, lord of the city of Hurma; Walwa-ziti, chief of the scribes; Alalimi, chief of the cupbearers; Kammaliya, chief of the cooks; and Mahhuzzi, chief of the offering officials.
Whether it is Victorian India, Tenochtitlan, medieval Bohemia, shogun Japan, the world of The Leopard or Bronze Age Anatolia, this is the air breathed in any court, dense with rank, title, glamor, precedence and surely a hint, here and there, of what is called, even now in palaces, Red Carpet Fever: excitement at being connected with the royal.
That self-importance surfaces in Homer in the overbrimming superciliousness of the Phaeacians, condescendingly welcoming the shipwrecked seafarer Odysseus to Alcinous’s regal halls. The Phaeacians “never suffer strangers gladly.” They don’t like him much, nor he them. Even here, as he is accepting their hospitality, Homer gives him the traditional epithet he shares with Achilles and Arēs, the god of war: ptoliporthos Odysseus (city-ravaging Odysseus).
They guess he might be captain of a ship full of men who are prēktēres—an interesting word, with its origins in the verb for “to do,” meaning that Odysseus comes over to the Phaeacians not as a nobleman who can play athletic games but as the leader of a band of practical, pragmatic practicers of things, merchants in other words, dealers, or as Robert Fagles translated it “profiteers,” freebooters who blurred the boundary between trader and pirate. Nothing irks Odysseus more powerfully than the suggestion that he is merely a sea-robber or tradesman. Is he not a hero? Has he not fought at Troy? Has he not suffered at sea? But the suspicion won’t go away. When he and his crew find themselves facing Polyphemus, the Cyclops, the same idea recurs. “Strangers, who are you?” the Cyclops asks them. “Where do you come from, sailing over the sea-ways? Are you trading? Or are you roaming wherever luck takes you over the sea? Like pirates?”
Perhaps this is a reflection in Homer of a reality that the poems do their best to conceal. Odysseus and the other Greek chieftains might think of themselves as noble kings, the fit subjects for epic. Homer does its best to portray them as that. The civilized states of the Mediterranean saw them as anything but. What were they but the “much-wandering pirates” Odysseus sometimes talks about, taking what they could from the wealth of the world around them, hugely status-rich in their own eyes, virtually status-less in the eyes of those they were coming to rob? It is exactly how Odysseus himself describes his behavior as he leaves Troy. “From Ilium the wind carried me,” he tells the Phaeacians, “and brought me to the Cicones.” This was a tribe, allied to the Trojans, who lived at Ismarus on the shore of the Aegean, somewhere north of Samothrace. “There I destroyed the city,” he goes on quite straightforwardly, using a term to mean that nothing was left, “and killed the men. And from the city we took their wives and many possessions, and divided it among us, so that as far as I could manage, no man would be cheated of an equal share.” It is one of the moments in which Homer coolly reveals the limitations of Odysseus’s mind. Our hero thinks he is telling his hosts how excellently he behaved, ensuring that unlike Agamemnon he did not mistreat his men. But he is blind to the significance of the actions preceding this exemplary fairness, the piratical destruction of an entire city and the enslaving of its women.
The same uncertain status of the pirate-king lies behind one of Odysseus’s most famous sleights of hand. He and his men are suffering at the hands of the Cyclops. The Cyclops wants to know who Odysseus is. In his answers, he says that his name is “Nobody.” The Greek for that is either outis, which sounds a little like Odysseus if spoken by a drunk or slack-jawed giant; or mētis, which also sounds like the Greek word for cleverness, craftiness, skill or a plot. When Polyphemus calls for help, the other Cyclopes ask who has hurt and blinded him. “Nobody!” he answers, or “Cleverness!” and so his friends—and the audience—can only laugh.
It is a nifty trick, but the story means more. Odysseus is indeed a nobody, essentially homeless, for all the illusions of an Ithaca floating somewhere beyond the unreachable horizon. His own naming of himself as a Nobody is an oblique and dreamlike reflection of exactly what the Phaeacians think of him. He may be king of Ithaca, the son of Laertes, a man whose fame has reached the sky, but that is not how the world of the Odyssey treats him. Everywhere he arrives anonymous, not somebody but nobody. Even when he comes home, he is more beggar than king, unrecognized by wife, son, subject or retainer. That double status is at the heart of the Odyssey: it may describe a historical situation—the marginality of people who were heroes to themselves—but it also addresses a permanent human condition. My own world may cultivate me, ennoble me, even heroize me, but what possible significance beyond the confines of home can those labels have? What possible standing could Odysseus have “in the city of Urikina, in the presence of Crown Prince Nerikkaili”?
* * *
In about 1350 BC, a treaty was drawn up between the Hittite Great King and a man known as Huqqana. He was from Hayasa, a region on the frontiers of the Hittite empire, in northeastern Anatolia, in what would later become Armenia. Hayasa, in a way similar to the condition of Greece in the centuries after 2000 BC, was an agglomeration of tribal chiefs, with no overarching or supreme leader. Because of this, and because of its incipient and eruptive anarchy, it was not, as far as the Hittites were concerned, part of the civilized world. The Hittite Great King, who referred to himself as “My Majesty,” had married off his sister to Huqqana in a form of political alliance, but there was anxiety in the air. How could he be sure that Huqqana, this man from beyond the borders of acceptability, would behave?
The expectations were not good. The Hittite king called his new brother-in-law “a low-born dog.” Huqqana mustn’t gossip, which he would be tempted to do: “Given that they now bring you up to my palace and that you hear about the customs of the palace it is important! You shall not divulge outside the palace what you know or what you hear.”
More problematic was the question of sex.
Furthermore this sister, whom I, My Majesty, have given to you as your wife, has many sisters from her own family as well as from her extended family. For us the Hittites, it is an important custom that a brother does not take his sister or female cousin sexually. It is not permitted. Whoever does such a thing is put to death. Because your land is barbaric, it is in conflict [without law]. There a man quite regularly takes his sister or female cousin. But among the Hittites, it is not permitted.
Huqqana has to learn that he should treat women courteously and with dignity, an instruction that brings with it echoes of the distinction in the Iliad between Greek and Trojan treatment of women.
Then, strikingly in the middle of all this treaty language, the Great King of the Hittites tells Huqqana a story, or at least reminds him of one, which can’t fail to drive the point home. Huqqana, when he came to the palace, was to be careful around the women he met there. “When you see a palace woman, jump out of the way and leave her a broad path.” Did he remember the story of Mariya, clearly someone who had once been close to him, perhaps another chieftain from Hayasa?
And for what reason did he die? Did not a lady’s maid walk by and he look at her? But the father of My Majesty himself looked out of the window and caught him in his offence, saying “You—why did you look at her?” So he died for that reason. The man perished just for looking from afar. So you beware.
Just as the Tale of Sinuhe reorients the Homeric vision of the hero and allocates him effectively the role of thug, the story of Mariya, the Hayasa warrior chief who dared look at one of the lady’s maids of the Hittite court, puts the skids under the bland assumption, underlying much of that Iliadic world, that women were for the taking.
Other intriguing historical realities appear in these Hittite documents. They are late in this story. By the fourteenth century BC, the Mycenaean Greeks had established their palaces on the mainland, had become at least administratively literate themselves and were now dominant in Crete and across the Aegean. They had entered a form of existence that had absorbed much of the organized state apparatus and mentality of the Mediterranean world. By now they were as Trojan as the Trojans.
All that, in the lightest of touches, is confirmed in the Hittite documents. In a treaty drawn up in about 1250 BC between the Great King of the Hittites and the king of Amurru, in northern Lebanon, the Great King, as ever, tells his treaty partner how to behave.
If the King of Egypt is My Majesty’s friend, he shall be your friend. But if he is My Majesty’s enemy, he shall be your enemy. And the Kings who are my equals in rank are the King of Egypt, the King of Babylonia, the King of Assyria and the King of Ahhiyawa.
That last name should leap out at you. After many decades of acrimonious scholarly debate, it is now generally accepted that Ahhiyawa is the Hittite transcription of Achaea, the Homeric name for Greece, and that the king of Ahhiyawa’s inclusion in this most distinguished list of the great powers of the late Bronze Age is a mark of the Mycenaean triumph. That great quasi-imperial status does not reflect the atmosphere of the Iliad, nor of Odysseus, the homeless, the wandering albatross of the southern sea. By the time these treaties were being drawn up, the Greeks were no longer the outsiders; they had become members of the Mediterranean power network.
Not that that peace prevailed. The margins of these states were ragged and contested, and the great kings were always planning and making moves against each other in the crush zones between their empires. On the western margins of Anatolia, where the king of Ahhiwaya could wield most power, he consistently troubled the allies of the Great King of the Hittites. At some time before 1400 BC, a Hittite ally in the far west of the Hittite zone of influence, Madduwatta, was attacked by a king of “Ahhiya” and driven out of his lands, at least until the Hittites came to his aid. When the old Hittite king died, his son wanted to remind Madduwatta of the service that had been done to him.
The father of My Majesty saved you, together with your wives, your sons, your household servants and together with your infantry and your chariotry. Otherwise dogs would have devoured you from hunger. Even if you had escaped you would have died of hunger.
The most fascinating word in this extraordinary document is the name of the ruler of Ahhiya: he is called Attarissiya. That is not a Hittite name, nor is it exactly Greek, but it may well be what “Atreus” sounded like to a Hittite—the name in Homer of the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, itself perhaps a derivative of atrestos, “the untrembling, the fearless.”
From these few threads some kind of fabric can be woven, describing a tense, mutually suspicious and occasionally violent relationship between the Greeks and the Hittite empire. Attarissiya had invaded Hittite territory with foot soldiers and a hundred chariots, and had also fought alongside Madduwatta in an attack on Cyprus. Another warrior, the Greek king’s brother, the Hittites called Tawagalawas or Tawakalawas, which is the way they might have heard the name of a Greek called Eteocles (which happens to be the name of Oedipus’s son). A letter also survived in the foreign office archives in Hattusa, from a Greek they knew as Kagamunas or perhaps Katamunas, a name which has been interpreted as Kadmos, the greatest of the Thebans.
It is like a picture of the post-Homeric world, one that the rulers of the great Mycenaean palaces might have recognized, but surviving only in the most fragmentary and enigmatic of splinters. Part of this jagged Greek–Hittite boundary of the thirteenth century BC was a pair of places called in the documents “Taruisa” and “Wilusa.” Hittite scholars are now certain that these are the names of places referred to by Homer as Troy and Ilios. They may be two places conflated in the Iliad or a region and its capital. In a treaty with the Great King of the Hittites, the king of Wilusa is addressed as Alaksandu. That is a Hittite version of a Greek name, Alexandros, the alternative name which the Iliad gives to Paris, Priam’s son. By the time of these late documents, Troy had become a Greek-governed city, absorbed into the Greek world, at archaeological levels where shards of Mycenaean pottery have also been found. If there had ever been a Trojan war, it had already happened, and the Greeks had won.
The relationship remained tense between the Hittite king and the Greek prince at Troy, and the treaty includes some significant instructions sent out to this marginal kinglet from the imperial capital far to the east. The Hittite administration was keen to impose the written word as the medium of communication between them and the modern test of authenticity. “People are treacherous,” the Great King told Alaksandu.
If rumours circulate, and someone comes and whispers to you “His Majesty is undertaking something to do you down, and will take the land away from you, or will mistreat you in some way,” write about it to My Majesty. And if the matter is true, when I, My Majesty, write back to you, you shall not act rashly.
That sounds like an instruction from the urban to the oral world, from the literate Near East to a culture that had yet to think of writing as a central aspect of government. It is one of the great transitions of history—the Homeric horizon, caught at the very moment the Greeks were crossing it.
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A third, suddenly reorienting view of these relationships appears in, of all places, the Old Testament. Just at the moment the Greek king Attarissiya was raiding Anatolia and Cyprus, in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, and establishing settlements which archaeologists have been uncovering in the last few decades, the cities around Gaza in southern Canaan were taken and occupied by people whom the Jews called the Philistines. They had been drawn to the markets and the grassy downland of southern Palestine, where beautiful pear and almond orchards surround the mudbrick villages and where cattle and horses can graze on the clover and young barley of the open plains. Their lands—Philistia—are now the gentle, hilly farmland of southwestern Israel. “Philistine” in Hebrew means “the invader” or “the roller-in,” and from the style of their rock-cut chamber tombs, the pottery they made once they had arrived in Canaan and from the form of their own names, it is clear that these Philistines, arriving from out of the west, were Mycenaean Greeks, cruising the Mediterranean seas, searching out new lands, ready to fight whomever they found there.
The war in Canaan between Greek and Hebrew was long and grievous, but at its symbolic climax, as depicted in the First Book of the Prophet Samuel, the readers are treated to one of the most hostile depictions of Homeric warrior culture ever written. The Philistines had taken up position on a hillside at Socoh in the rolling agricultural country of the Judean foothills, a few miles west of Bethlehem. A champion came out of the Philistine camp, a man called Goliath, to challenge the Israelites drawn up on the opposite hillside.
Goliath is a huge, clumsy, half-ludicrous, threatening and contemptible figure. He is, even in the earliest and least exaggerated manuscripts, six feet nine inches tall, wearing the full equipment of the Homeric hero: a bronze helmet on his head, bronze armor on his chest, bronze greaves on his legs and carrying a sword and dagger of bronze. Everything about him is vast. His armor weighs nearly 140 pounds, the head of his spear fifteen pounds.
Massively overequipped, a cross between Ajax and Desperate Dan, Goliath stands there shouting across the valley at his enemies:
Why do you come out to do battle, you slaves of Saul? I am the Philistine champion; choose your man to meet me. If he can kill me in fair fight, we will become your slaves; but if I prove too strong for him and kill him, you shall be our slaves and serve us. Here and now I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man … and we will fight it out.
The stolidity of the Greek, his philistinism, his need to spell everything out, to put his own self-aggrandisement into endlessly self-elevating words—all of that comes out of Goliath like the self-proclaiming spout of a whale. But this is exactly what in the Iliad one Greek warrior after another liked and needed to do. Shouted aggression, the Homeric haka, was the first act of any Greek battle.
“When Saul and the Israelites heard what the Philistine said, they were shaken and dismayed.” It was not in them to make the symmetrical response—you shout at me, I’ll shout at you—which is one of the foundations of the Homeric system. And so a painful and faintly ludicrous asymmetrical situation developed. “Morning and evening for forty days the Philistine drew near and presented himself,” standing there, twice a day for a month and a half, bellowing across the valley like a giant bronze cuckoo clock.
The shepherd boy David, the youngest of his family, whose brothers are in the Israelite host facing the Philistines, is told by his father, Jesse, to take some loaves and cream cheeses to their commander. He arrives there and to his amazement sees and hears Goliath shouting away. “Who is he,” David asks, “an uncircumcised Philistine, to defy the army of the living god?” That is not a Greek question. A Greek would have understood what Goliath was saying, and would have responded by strapping on his armor. Defiance and the locking of horns was no more than a recognition of Homeric reality. When Saul, the king of the Jews, finally accepts that David might respond to the challenge of the Greek giant, he tries to dress him in his own armor. David accepts it meekly but then hesitates and proclaims his difference.
“I cannot go with these because I have not tried them.” So he took them off. And he picked up his stick, and chose five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had with him as a pouch. He walked out to meet the Philistine with his sling in his hand.
It is a version of the Homeric arming of the hero and the single-combat meeting of warriors, the monomachia between Paris and Menelaus, Hector and Ajax, Achilles and Hector, which anchors the whole of the Homeric experience. But this is more like a parody of it than a borrowing. The unprotected boy, with his shepherd’s bag and stick, crouches down in the brook running between the two embattled hillsides, and with his fingers in the water, picks out the plain smoothness of five good stones. No love affair with bronze, no sharpness, no self-enlargement. In everything David does, and in every lack he suffers, there is one implied and overwhelming fact: the god of the Israelites. In his presence the difference between armor and armorlessness, bronze and flesh, is like smoke in wind.
And the Philistine came on and drew near unto David and the man that bare the shield went before him. And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him; for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. “Am I a dog that you come out against me with sticks?” And he swore at him in the name of his gods. “Come on,” he said, “and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.”
David told him that he would kill him and cut off his head,
and all the world shall know there is a god in Israel. All those who are gathered here shall see that the LORD saves neither by sword nor spear; the battle is the LORD’s and he will put you all into our power.
And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.
Is there any wonder that this story has lasted as long as Homer? Those forty days of shouting, all the grandeur of bronze, the whole rhetoric of assertive Homeric heroism, is now clogged with the mud filling Goliath’s mouth and nostrils. A painting by the young Caravaggio, now in the Prado, of David after the death of Goliath is, in this way, one of the most beautiful commentaries on Homer that has ever been made. It is Caravaggio’s least violent and most understanding version of that subject. Michelangelo had shown David on the Sistine Chapel ceiling with his sword in midswipe over Goliath’s neck. Titian had painted a butcher’s view of the cut neck itself. Caravaggio himself would later paint ferocious and tragic images of David holding the severed head (a head which bears the painter’s own grieving features), but this first David of his is soaked in calm. The boy looks as if he is about twelve years old. His body is wrapped in a loose white cloth. His lower legs are bare and his feet inelegant, the toes slightly misaligned, with dirt under the nails and a soreness around them. Nothing is idealized. Goliath’s vast dead hand remains clenched on the ground, and blood has dried on his big severed head, around the wound left by David’s slung stone, the puncture through which the heroic balloon has collapsed.
What survives in the painting is the beauty of the boy, his intentness on the knot as he ties a cord around Goliath’s hair, his simplicity, his seriousness, his lack of bombast. He kneels on the giant Greek chest, from which the head was severed, as if on a workbench, blood just staining his hand, his own face in shadow, a face of humility, the heroism entirely inward. This is the view of Greek heroism given us by the Hebrew scriptures: weak and bombastic compared to the clarity and strength of the pious mind.